Today’s consumer is always on the go. In just one day we can wear any number of hats from parent to executive to coach to personal financier. Such shifts in persona have traditionally made it difficult for organisations and marketers to truly deliver personalised services, but what if they knew enough to accurately target our persona at any given time?

Call it ‘Personalisation 2.0′ - a revolution that’s being driven by two key factors.

First and foremost: the end user is now in control. Gone are the days of broadcasters airing programming without regard for the viewer’s schedule. Organisations, not end users, occupied the centre of the first personalisation wave. Today, however, with set-top digital video recorders (DVRs), broadcasters making their shows available online and the mobile Web freeing us to watch what we want, when we want, where we want, we’re now the centre of the media universe.

Secondly, mobile technologies are creating ‘Anywhere Customers,’ but unless mobility can result in action or transaction, nothing is accomplished from a marketing or brand standpoint. For example, while being driven to a dinner party, a woman might change persona to the role of family financier and with a few keystrokes, pay the family phone bill directly through a handheld device. Now, the bank and likely her phone company have built some brand equity, because they’ve made it possible for her to change persona at her convenience.

Personalisation really starts to look interesting when there’s greater contextual understanding. Thanks to concepts like time-shifting and place-shifting, popularised by Sky+ and Sling Media respectively, marketing professionals can better understand how and when we prefer to receive media.

For example, a father wakes up in the morning, turns on the TV and watches BBC Breakfast or Sky News as he gets ready for work. Then his two young children enter the room. All of a sudden, the father’s persona changes. Now instead of monitoring the financial news or checking today’s weather forecast, he becomes cartoon-watching dad, flipping over to kids’ programming to enjoy a few minutes with his children. Which persona is the user assuming at any given moment?

Marketers will soon have the framework to recognise this shift and tactically target demographic- or location-appropriate content accordingly. Content and advertising that might have interested the father while he was watching sports highlights - a spot promoting the DVD release of Die Hard 4.0 for example - is no longer of interest when his children are in the room.

On the other side of the Personalisation 2.0 equation, marketers need to enable their customers to take action. That’s why it’s important for marketing and advertising professionals to know their audience on a more personal level. What are their personas? How often do they shift? What causes that shift? Based on marketers’ ability to measure personas, the day is rapidly approaching when multiple TVs tuned to the same program within a single household will display entirely different advertisements - one aimed at Mum, say, and the other at her pre-teen daughter.

Recognising these shifts in persona is only part of the Personalisation 2.0 equation. Where this idea starts to gain traction is when the user can be in control of his or her experience at any time and place. Imagine a personal portal that you can literally take with you where ever you go, where every function you perform on the Web - mobile banking, checking sports scores, accessing your company’s Intranet, downloading music - is available without opening multiple browsers that require multiple logins.

This is where ‘the Web’ becomes ‘My Web’, and that’s the essence of Personalisation 2.0.

This is where the technology gets out of the way, and lets the user take control. Why would an organisation want to yield control to the user? Think about the customer loyalty, the cross-sell and up-sell possibilities associated with delivering more relevant content and value-added services. Finally, increased customer satisfaction often leads to reduced customer churn. This is a win-win scenario for all concerned so it is up to organisations to fully embrace the digital era and get ‘personal’.